


We Are No Longer Quite Ourselves

by Satin_Swallow



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/M, Romance, Year of Quotes Challenge, faith - Freeform, life - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-03-06 18:09:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13416747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Satin_Swallow/pseuds/Satin_Swallow
Summary: This is my contribution to the January round of the Year of Quotes Challenge for Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.I disagreed so wholly with e. e. cummings, I thought I'd better write about it! Jack Robinson, Dorothy Collins, Hugh Collins, and Phryne Fisher reflect on thinking, believing, knowing, and feeling.





	We Are No Longer Quite Ourselves

_“Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”  
_ (e. e. cummings)

 

~*~*~

 

_i. think._

They put a lot of stock in feeling, Jack Robinson thinks.

 

While he can cherish as much as the next man the way he loses himself in her eyes, her arguments, he can’t quite make the leap to agreeing that he is only himself because of it. His thoughts have been his friends this many years, and indeed have guided him keenly through a world of brushstrokes that have striven to drive him mad with their blend of colour and subjectivity.

 

His thinking gives him sense, reason, rationality.

 

He will never agree that these are not himself when they have brought him home from war, turned his anxieties to an active productivity, given meaning to the senselessness of agony, and turned him time and again to a mission that is always present at the core, when the wild winds of doubt blow.

 

Nor will he allow the implication that the presence of others in his being is a fault to be rectified. By extension of that principle, he is certain that he would have been completely shipwrecked without the steady circle of other voices in his head to anchor him at port.

 

He doesn’t trust himself to recognise the Truth every time he questions it.  

 

As he lies in blue silence, midnight in his breathing, and the soft weight of love on his shoulder, he knows full well that balance is the mark of order. Here in this dangerous space between recklessness and paralysis is the answer to the queries of his heart and head combined. Somewhere between alone and together is the pinnacle of peace.

 

She’s breathing so softly, and it’s reason that tells him she’ll do it again, come back, and come back to him with each smile and red kiss.

 

It’s disordered feeling that lies, whispers to him in the dark on other less comfortable nights, and brings out the fear that turns to jealous regret, or aggression at the sight of blood on white silk. It’s disordered feeling that hopes to break them apart, and tries with his hurts to disrupt their hearts.

 

He loves her much better, with thoughts in his head, and people to tell him the difference between cherishing and devouring.

 

They put a lot of stock in feeling, Jack Robinson thinks.

 

***

 

_ii. believe._

 

Dorothy Collins believes what her mother once told her.

 

“Ave Maria, gratia plena,” she whispers softly over Christopher’s head, kissing the feather-fine hair that tickles at her neck, as he snuggles closer than she ever thought possible.

 

It’s nightmares again, of the inexplicable kind -- faceless shapes and shadows in the corners of the room he shares with his brother, and stories he can’t even repeat when she asks him what’s wrong. So they pray together, the prayer of St Michael, and ask his guardian angel to watch over his sleep.

 

And now as he holds tight to his mother, she turns to hers with the gentlest hope.

 

“Mother Mary, watch over my boy,” she asks, “and when I can’t be there to hold him as close as I want to? Grant him the kisses of Grace that consoled your Son in _His_ darkest hour.”

 

She can feel the warmth of the smile of Heaven, the deep residing joy of the closeness of love -- and she thinks of her mother, gone now three years, and cries a little as she rocks her son to calm. How wonderful is this bond, this Truth that stretches across the ages to take her mother’s hand and extend it passed the veil to touch her so sweetly in mercy.

 

She’s never alone, and it’s more than comfort to her little soul, it’s light and life, and every little atom of her being, a promise of Goodness when the world screams in their faces. In the perilous winter of the violent that seem to dominate the streets with their shouting, she finds herself grounded in peace and the wonder of a Hand pressed lightly to her shoulder.

 

“Thank you, Mum,” she whispers into the night, making the sign of the Cross over her breast and her child, and offering her heart for all the suffering and broken.

 

“Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.”*

 

Dorothy Collins believes what her mother once told her.

 

* _Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the our of our death. Amen._

 

***

 

_iii. know._

Better to know, Hugh Collins. Better to know.

 

He remembers how he fretted over a Crucifix, once -- the bold doubt in his mind and the three days he wasted in fear and upset. He remembers how it drove him to the cold of his bones, dismissal and hardness in the face of any challenge.

 

Not even the Inspector had been able to give him the clarity he had needed. How he had silenced the whole thing in his mind.

 

As his _wife_ settles in, beside him on the sofa, sighs a contentment his heart can hardly bear, he looks down at that same little Crucifix, and smiles.

 

To think he had been more content to drift between hope and despair, holding to nothing, rather than settle on a Truth that might contain hardships along with its bliss. To have her, he knows, is sacrifice and challenge alongside the sheer electricity of her looking at him daily, but he wouldn’t trade it for a second for that empty No Man’s Land of stoic protection from the pain of knowing that life isn’t only easy.

 

His chest constricts at the thought that he might never have loved her.

 

How much darkness ought to be avoided to make it worth never having the light?     

 

His newspaper rests almost limply in his hand, heavy with the weight of reality despite what he thinks he can control. Her squeeze to his arm is everything he’s ever hoped for. His kiss is quick, fervent in its hurry to answer her call, pressed just firmly enough to her temple to share everything he _knows_ : like how much he needs her.

 

“I love you, Hugh,” she whispers beside him, and the burning of tears is impossible to repress.

 

“I love you too, Dottie,” he declares, in his own quiet fervour. 

 

Better to know, Hugh Collins. Better to know.

 

***

_iv. feel._

 

It’s an impossibility to share all that Phryne Fisher feels.

 

The vivid light of the world around her seems to coalesce in her gut from moment to moment, and pounce on the nearest opportunity for mirth and mayhem. Every flower is too beautiful, every song too sweet, and she knows she’ll never contain it all, despite the colossal nature of her desires and delights.

 

She’s driven from the core by this _fire_ , and no matter her generosity with it, it burns and burns and burns.

 

She gives it away like too much fairy dust, a sprinkling here and a sprinkling there, covering everything in it with as much verve as she can muster. She _lives_ , and she cries, and she screams, and she loves with an openness that seems never to be exhausted despite how painful it can be.

 

Then, is pain not a feeling too? A deep ocean blue in the spectrum of colour?    

 

She knows that she is most herself when she embraces it, takes it to her veins with abandon.

 

Of course, as she watches him one day, his frown over his breakfast as though it’s a puzzle to be solved, she knows too that there’s more to this than _her_ – her feeling, her heart. She knows that without him, the morning sun will be a little less golden, the air a little cooler than the burst of affection that blossoms in her chest, and sets her mind to mischief.

 

And it’s clear in a vivid moment, the parade of faces before her – Mac, and Jane, and her mother and more – that being herself is only a part.

 

She slips from her chair like a wisp in a breeze, and sneaks and attacks as he fights back too late. His laugh is free, bold and unmanaged as she presses her lips up against it once more, and smothers his protestations that his breakfast will get cold.

 

When he finally breaks, and looks her square in the eye, adoring and adored, she knows the Truth, once more.    

 

It’s an impossibility to share all that Phryne Fisher feels.

 

*~*~*

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment if you have a chance!


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